Media Art and Immersive Environments

3 units

The participatory turn in art over the past five and a half decades has produced an array of immersive environments that enhance the viewer's perception of their body and heighten awareness of their bodily relationship to space. A key mechanism in this choreography often involves the optical representation of shadows and mirrors, captivating visual phenomena and/or moving projections. While some produce unique phenomenological experiences, others offer nuanced or explicit sociopolitical meaning. In any case, technology often activates many spatially oriented works, dramatically altering the tenor of the embodied experience while offering new ways for our technologically mediated sensoria to shape our sense of presence within the physical world. This primarily seminar-based course will explore installation art and immersive environments, many of which use evolving technologies or time-based media to affect the viewer's awareness of their bodily existence. Examples will include Olafur Eliasson's Fog Room and Multiple Shadow Room, James Turrell's Light Reignfall, Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate and Whirlpool, Jennifer Steinkamp's Jimmy Carter, Krzysztof Wodiczko's A House Divided, Cyprien Gaillard's Nightlife, and Won Ju Lim's California Dreamin'. This course will also explore how immersive spaces operate on different registers while reinforcing the viewer's recognition of themselves as doppelganger, as hybrid, or as Other. Students will learn how each work in its own way tinkers with the viewer's perception of their own bodily scale and encourages spectacular forms of engagement that reinforce corporeality.